Leadership Development Advisors: Children's Social Work

Background

Firstline is a development programme specifically for people who manage children’s social workers. Firstline equips managers with the leadership skills they need to develop the social workers in their teams, ensuring they are focused on practice and have the skills and motivation to undertake genuinely transformational work with children and families.

The Opportunity

We are recruiting a number of talented individuals to act as Leadership Development Advisors, an important role crucial in developing individual social work managers.

Leadership Development Advisors (LDA) work closely with Firstline Leaders to challenge thinking; stimulate creativity; and provide the tools and techniques they need to build awareness and confidence. We are looking for people who are driven and inspired by the opportunity to develop social work managers to provide the best possible leadership to the social workers in their teams, in order to improve the lives of children and families.

The role offers flexibility with relation to hours. Each Leadership Development Advisor will be allocated to a number of Firstline Leaders. While the exact number will depend on logistical factors and other considerations, we envisage each LDA to be responsible for between two and six participants. LDAs will be required to spend 12 hours with each Leader over six sessions, between March and November 2017. The sessions will take place in office hours within the local authority, at times to be agreed with the Firstline Leader. We require LDAs to participate in a training day, and regular meetings and conference calls throughout the programme. We are working with the following local authorities: Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, London, Manchester, Newcastle and North Yorkshire.

Who we are looking for

We are looking for experienced and talented individuals who are aligned with our mission to transform the lives of vulnerable children, and who are energised by the prospect of developing our Firstline Leaders. Firstline closely supports Leadership Development Advisors to ensure they are clear on our vision and aims for the programme and have the knowledge to help realise these.

We are looking for people with one or more of the following:

Extensive senior management experience within a children’s social work setting

A coaching qualification and experience of successfully coaching others